We are six weeks away from one of the biggest stock market debuts in history, and cryptocurrencies are in the same liquidity pool from which they will attract interest.
SpaceX filed a confidential Form S-1 with the SEC earlier this month, targeting a $75 billion capital raise at a $1.75 trillion valuation.
If the price approaches that level at its expected June listing, the offering will be more than 2.5 times larger than Saudi Aramco’s record of $29 billion in 2019, making it the largest stock market debut in history. Polymarket traders assign a 65% probability of a June listing and a 53% probability that the first-day closing market capitalization will exceed $2 trillion.
SpaceX is not alone. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, aims to list in the fourth quarter at a valuation close to $1 trillion. Anthropic is reportedly planning an October debut that could raise more than $60 billion.
If all three reach the public market in time, they would raise more than $240 billion from June to the end of the year, a figure that PitchBook estimates surpasses all venture-backed U.S. IPOs combined since 2000.
“After the SpaceX IPO, I think the stock is starting to get very bearish. That’s the time for $300 Solana,” said Alex Good, founder of artificial intelligence crypto project Post Fiat, in a recent interview with CounterParty TV.
“Right now we are in this peak supply moment, every investment bank is going to upgrade every AI stock because they are going to get a lot of commissions on these IPOs.”
Good’s framework captures the mechanical setup, where the three largest listings could be concentrated in a six-month window, preceded by coordinated selling optimism by the banks executing the deals and followed by rotation.
MSCI, the firm that builds many of the benchmark stock indices that track institutional portfolios, modeled a scenario in February that said mega-cap IPOs in 2026 could trigger index-driven flows measured in billions of dollars, sector rotation effects in global benchmarks and a compression of liquidity in everything other than new names.
Cryptocurrencies sit within the same pool of risky liquidity that funds technology and artificial intelligence stocks.
Bitcoin, ether, and the rest of the major companies have traded with an increasingly tight correlation to the Nasdaq and S&P 500 over the past two cycles. When speculative capital leaves stocks for an IPO allocation, some of what leaves is the same capital that would otherwise drive higher beta assets, including cryptocurrencies, higher.
However, the historical parallel is a cause for concern. Coinbase listed on April 14, 2021 at the peak of the last bitcoin cycle. Bitcoin hit its all-time high of around $64,800 on the same day and began a 50% drop in six weeks.
Traders who interpreted Coinbase’s IPO as a sign that cryptocurrencies were going mainstream spent the next six months watching the rotation of mainstream capital. The lesson is that institutional milestones often mark peaks rather than starting lines, because the capital chasing the milestone is the same capital that was previously holding the asset.
SpaceX is not a crypto company, but two features on the list connect directly to crypto streams. First, the 30% retail allocation, approximately $22 billion of the $75 billion offering, is three times the typical retail share in a deal of this size.
This retail allocation to SpaceX is money that is not being bid on memecoins, altcoins, or bitcoin itself.
Second, SpaceX itself holds 8,285 BTC worth approximately $600 million in Coinbase Prime custody, making its IPO the first public market debut of a company with a material bitcoin position disclosed under new fair value accounting rules that went into effect in late 2024.
The testable signal going forward is whether the cryptocurrency holds up during the roadshow window in May and June or begins to decline as allocators clear space for the SpaceX subscription.
However, a rally-long rally in bitcoin suggests that spot ETF supply has decoupled cryptocurrencies from broader risk flows.
Coinbase’s peak in April 2021 was a company and $86 billion of market cap absorbed in a single day. SpaceX, at $75 billion, is not an expanded Coinbase. It’s a different kind of event, valued in a market that has had five years to learn from the last one.
Whether cryptocurrencies treat the lesson as learned or learn it again will be visible on the tape starting in about six weeks.
